


Someone loves you (Forty-Two)

by sweetest (hoesthetic)



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Healing, M/M, Mental Instability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 08:16:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15815016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoesthetic/pseuds/sweetest
Summary: Chan is supposed to stop the car and turn to him and kiss him silly. Hyunjin is supposed to lean into him and smile and feel butterflies in his stomach and happiness like sunsets and summer nights. He is supposed to feel infinite and powerful all while being mortal and temporary.Instead he just feels—this.Whatever this is.





	Someone loves you (Forty-Two)

He taps his fingers against the leather seat beneath his thighs. The importance of summer nights and the sky turning pink, to the shades of peaches and bruises. Hyunjin taps the leather seat and thinks, _this is it_.

Divine moments of going nowhere with the silence replaced with a tacky pop song playing in the radio. Not mindblowing realizations but just _okay_. Okay. Hyunjin is fine with okay.

If it’s enough for the next thirty minutes, then it is enough. The aching melancholy of this life, and how the seasons pass from winter to spring, and new things come and the snow melts. It’s not the final point, not quite what he needs but it’s something.

Crimson and carmine, the shades of red pass through his mind in faint pictures. Never again and it’s alright. And even if it isn’t it, it can be.

He hopes it could be.

Hyunjin removes his stare from the view, glancing at Chan, gripping the steering wheel next to him. He feels like laughing with wet eyes because it’s so ridiculously sad, but instead Hyunjin lets out a choked noise from the back of his throat, making Chan look at him briefly, brows raised and lips cocked into an amused smile. He looks gentle. Hyunjin adores him hopelessly, even if he is still a coward and won’t say it aloud.

“What?” Hyunjin asks, looking out of the window again.

“Nothing,” Chan responds, the smile apparent in his voice. It makes him feel some sorta way, but Hyunjin isn’t good at naming his emotions. He isn’t good at putting them in cardboard boxes, arranging them in neat rows, writing labels with a permanent marker, and calling it his home.

The heavy absence and neglect is quiet. A frosted ghost on the window from last February, it’s easy to forget and ignore but alone is alone, even if it’s a temporary thing. Life, too, is just a litany of phases and things that will not stay. And this is where the comfort lies—in the sheets of temporarity and how nothing is forever. Life is a losing game and not to even talk about love.

This is it, and Hyunjin trembles. He closes his eyes, and all he sees is red, but it’s not the end. Red against white tiles, it’s not forever. Overflowing bathtubs aren’t the ocean, it’s not permanent. Feigned comfort, Hyunjin opens his eyes, just to see more red, but other shades too, the sky is on fire and it’s breathtaking. The song changes to another when Hyunjin blinks his eyes.

When Hyunjin blinks his eyes, someone, somewhere, is born, and when he blinks them again, someone passes, and he keeps blinking, and things keep happening. Things that don’t define anything at all, things that don’t mean anything to him and he doesn’t mean anything to them. Hyunjin traces his thumb against the leather seat.

“Do you wanna head home soon?” Chan asks. Hyunjin can’t lie and say he likes that question, because no, he doesn’t like it, and no, he doesn’t want to. He would rather feel invisible for another second, to roll on the empty roads, where just the two of them exist and even they are disorientated and altered.

Hyunjin shakes his head carefully.

“Not yet, if that’s alright,” he mumbles, softly, as in fearing to break something if he talks too loudly. Perhaps that’s the case, maybe it’s not, Hyunjin would rather not dwell on it. He glances at Chan again. He isn’t looking at him, but the road, and whatever stretches out in front of them. He is smiling, Hyunjin doesn’t know why, but it makes him want to smile too.

“It’s cool,” Chan tells him. He never talks to him like Hyunjin is something fragile, but it still sounds gentle, not careful but caring.

Something blurs in his eyes and Hyunjin masks up the sniffle that escapes with a cough, looking away. The sky keeps burning up. Something is choking him. It hurts like it’s supposed to, like it wants to hurt him, scratch his insides and turn him around. Like it wants to—

Like it wants to live inside of him, destroy him to take place.

Chan’s hand is heavy on his shoulder, and Hyunjin wants to tell him to keep his hands on the steering wheel but he doesn’t trust himself to speak. He blinks rapidly, and things keep happening in a pace faster than before. He doesn’t know why this is happening, why things happen at all.

Hyunjin gets sad like he gets serious, like he gets uncomfortable. Serious faces with lips a straight line, not—not like this. Not like feelings suffocating him. He doesn’t want Chan to see him like this.

It doesn’t work like this in beautiful stories. He isn’t supposed to break when the moment is right, not when the second is the most beautiful.

The bridge they drive across is high. The water before his glossed eyes glimmers and shines like it’s swimming in glitter, but it could be just a view from blatant misjudgment, a lie caused by shifted perception when Hyunjin painfully wants to see things that aren’t there.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

Chan is supposed to stop the car and turn to him and kiss him silly. Hyunjin is supposed to lean into him and smile and feel butterflies in his stomach and happiness like sunsets and summer nights. He is supposed to feel infinite and powerful all while being mortal and temporary.

Instead he just feels—this.

Whatever this is. _(Okay.)_

Chan hums along to the song Hyunjin doesn’t recognize. He focuses on the way his voice sounds instead of the track from the radio, even if it’s quiet beneath the instruments and the impressive vocals, and Chan is just quiet, soft, gentle. Gentle, gentle, fragile, like porcelain. If he’d break, Hyunjin would watch—what do you do in situations like that? This is why he just keeps coughing and blinking instead of letting the feelings overpower him.

“Can I come over tonight?” Hyunjin asks, interrupting his humming.

“Sure,” Chan says. He can hear the edge in his voice, something unknown, something Hyunjin doesn’t really understand that well. It’s another thing he hopes for, just to understand, someday.

Hope is all he has now. Some people say hope is for fools, just a codename for eventual disappointment when things fall down and crash and burn. It’s a risky thing to do, to lean on things, to trust, to be. Everything is wobbly, unsure, unwritten. Hyunjin’s handwriting is a mess and he isn’t sure if he should write his own ending.

But hope is all he has. Okay, okay.

“Thanks,” Hyunjin says, but it’s barely a whisper. Things feel weird—foolish. Perhaps he is a fool.

“For what?” Chan laughs softly, like he didn’t expect to hear Hyunjin thanking him. He smiles shortly to himself. The red, orange and pink morph into dark blue in blurred hues. A part of him wishes for rain, another part never wants to see it ever again.

“I don’t know,” Hyunjin says. Love is a losing game but—

He thinks he could love him. Something close to that, at least. The best Hyunjin can do.

“Okay,” Chan chuckles. Yeah.

He turns to look at him and— _you’re beautiful,_ Hyunjin thinks, but it’s grossly sappy and tastes like acid in his mouth. He lets it be, lets it taste bitter and doesn’t say it aloud, but doesn’t swallow it down either. Chan glances at him and Hyunjin smiles carefully.

This isn’t the end. Liters of red printed in saturated pictures behind his eyes, but before his eyes, it’s the view, it’s Chan, it’s the present, it’s now. The realization tastes like blood. He opens his mouth but no words come out. It’s just an afterthought.

(Hyunjin hates the colour red. It reminds him of emergency numbers and bathtubs. It reminds him of lips, kissed or not. Insides of a mouth. He hates the way it looks against white, against dark blue. But the sky is navy blue by now. It’s temporary.)

“Let’s go home,” Hyunjin suggests. Chan just nods. Home is where your heart is, and Hyunjin’s is under his ribcage. What that means, he still has to figure it out.

It hurts like it's familiar—but he won't call it home. 

**Author's Note:**

> title is @ u, whoever u are, hopefully ur doing ok.


End file.
